Recently, digital image scanners are being used in many document handling and production tasks, including storing documents, transmitting documents (e.g., by electronic mail or by facsimile), and copying documents. Digital image scanners are available in a wide variety of different formats, including hand-held scanners and flatbed scanners. In operation, pages to be scanned are placed on a scanning surface of a digital image scanner. The pages may be placed on the scanning surface manually by an operator or automatically by an automatic document feeder that is operable to sequentially draw pages from a stack over the scanning surface. Some digital image scanners also include an automatic collator for automatically scanning two-sided pages.
Difficulties in post-scanning handling and processing operations may arise if the integrity of an original document is not preserved in the scanned document. For example, an automatic document feeder occasionally may draw two or more sheets over the scanning surface at the same time, resulting in missing pages in the scanned document. In addition, scanning operators that manually scan pages of a document may intentionally skip blank pages that may appear, for example, in a book, journal, or other publication. The resulting missing blank pages may cause problems when the scanned document is later reproduced in hard copy. For example, missing blank pages may result in incorrect page number placement and inconsistent gutter sizes in hard copies produced from scanned versions of bound documents in which the page number locations and gutter sizes are different for alternate (e.g., left and right) pages.